Dear Colleagues,
Please excuse me for congesting the system but I would like to draw your
attention to the fact that some of the versions of the IBI MacVector pro-
gram (for Macintosh) have incorrect genetic codes.
Here in Professor RH Crozier's lab we use the Version 3.5, and this ver-
sion has errors in the following codes:
Echinoderm mtDNA code: UGA is a stop but should be Trp,
Plant " " : CGG is a Trp but should be Arg.
Reference: Osawa et al. (1992) Recent evidence for Evolution of the Ge-
netic code. Microbiological Reviews 56:229-264.
It might be noted that MacVector provide no reference to the genetic codes
(as far as I can see).
In a recent telephone conversation with Ms Janie Avis, who is responsible
for providing the MacVector customer service in Australia, I was informed
that IBI, regardless of a previous notification about the echinoderm mtDNA
code made August last year, had released a subsequent version 4.0 in which
the error still existed.
I am in the process of trying to get IBI to correct the errors (others
might exist that have gone unnoticed) the code errors. Meanwhile, I will
advice you to check the genetic codes used in MacVector and not take them
for granted, as I did.
Yours sincerely,
Lars Sommer Jermiin
Dept. of Genetics and Human Variation
La Trobe University
Bundoora
Victoria 3083, Australia
(E-mail: GENLSJ at LURE.LATROBE.EDU.AU)
